The Refreshments – Let It Rock
An evening pause: Who says the world doesn’t love American culture? Watch a Swedish band and an English guitarist play classic rock.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Year: 2015
Curiosity has resumed science work
Engineers have decided they know enough about the short circuit produced by Curiosity’s drill two weeks ago that they can resume science operations while they figure out how to handle the issue.
Be prepared for more electrical problems in the future. This issue is unfortunately not going to go away.
Archeologists discover the world’s oldest pretzel
Archeologists have uncovered a pretzel 250 years old, as well as bread roll and a croissant, at an excavation in the eastern Bavarian city of Regensburg.
A peek into the world’s largest underground mine
Link here.
Obama learns of existence of mysterious ‘‘Hillary Clinton’’ from news!
President Obama was reportedly shocked and stunned to learn from simply watching the news on Wednesday of the existence of this formally unknown yet very important “Hillary Clinton” person whom not only had been his Democratic primary opponent in 2007 and 2008, but had also been his Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
Ganymede’s underground salt water ocean
By measuring the interaction of Jupiter and Ganymede’s magnetic fields, scientists have been able to estimate the size of the salt water ocean in Ganymede’s interior.
A team of scientists led by Joachim Saur of the University of Cologne in Germany came up with the idea of using Hubble to learn more about the inside of the moon. “I was always brainstorming how we could use a telescope in other ways,” said Saur. “Is there a way you could use a telescope to look inside a planetary body? Then I thought, the aurorae! Because aurorae are controlled by the magnetic field, if you observe the aurorae in an appropriate way, you learn something about the magnetic field. If you know the magnetic field, then you know something about the moon’s interior.”
If a saltwater ocean were present, Jupiter’s magnetic field would create a secondary magnetic field in the ocean that would counter Jupiter’s field. This “magnetic friction” would suppress the rocking of the aurorae. This ocean fights Jupiter’s magnetic field so strongly that it reduces the rocking of the aurorae to 2 degrees, instead of 6 degrees if the ocean were not present. Scientists estimate the ocean is 60 miles (100 kilometers) thick — 10 times deeper than Earth’s oceans — and is buried under a 95-mile (150-kilometer) crust of mostly ice.
That’s more water than contained in all of Earth’s oceans.
Family flees home due to death threats
Modern American freedom: The parents of one of the Oklahoma fraternity students caught on video making a racist chant have fled their home due to death threats.
As vile as the racist chanting was, it was not threatening anyone with death. Moreover, we have something called the first amendment, which protects all speech, even the vile kind. Threatening the parents of someone who says something you don’t like is hardly standing up for righteous principles.
In related news, Christians at George Washington University in the District of Columbia face punishment because they refuse to participate in gay sensitivity training sessions.
A conservative student group at The George Washington University faces punishment, including the loss of its funding, for refusing to engage in LGBT sensitivity training on campus. The students are now being condemned and attacked on campus by those who claim they’re committing an “act of violence” for standing up for their members’ individual rights and Judeo-Christian values. The Young America’s Foundation chapter at the Washington, D.C.-based academic institute has refused to participate in LGBT sensitivity training recently made as a requirement.
Amanda Robbins, vice president of GW YAF, told The Christian Post that their objection to the training “stems not only from many of our members’ Judeo-Christian values, but also from our organization’s commitment to defending the individual rights of every student on campus. We firmly believe that there should be no such preconditions for any student organization to be able to operate freely on campus,” said Robbins.
The closest exoplanet is Earth-sized
Having detected an exoplanet circling Alpha Centauri B in 2012, astronomers have now narrowed its mass to one to three times that of Earth, making this closest exoplanet an Earth-sized planet.
Crew returns safely from ISS
A Soyuz capsule returned three astronauts safely to Earth today, including the first Russian female astronaut since 1997.
Katie Melua – If you were a sailboat
An evening pause: Hat tip Danae.
New Horizons adjusts its course
In preparing for its July 14 fly-by of Pluto, engineers fired New Horizons’ engines on Tuesday for 93 seconds to fine-tune its trajectory.
They will have four more opportunities to make further course adjustments.
Tiny grains from the interior ocean of Enceladus
Using Cassini scientists have detected tiny grains of rock orbiting Saturn that they think were formed on the floor of the interior ocean of Enceladus and then spewed out its vents into space.
They believe that these silicon-rich grains originate on the seafloor of Enceladus, where hydrothermal processes are at work. On the seafloor, hot water at a temperature of at least 90 degrees Celsius dissolves minerals from the moon’s rocky interior. The origin of this energy is not well understood, but likely includes a combination of tidal heating as Enceladus orbits Saturn, radioactive decay in the core and chemical reactions.
As the hot water travels upward, it comes into contact with cooler water, causing the minerals to condense out and form nano-grains of ‘silica’ floating in the water. To avoid growing too large, these silica grains must spend a few months to several years at most rising from the seafloor to the surface of the ocean, before being incorporated into larger ice grains in the vents that connect the ocean to the surface of Enceladus. After being ejected into space via the moon’s geysers, the ice grains erode, liberating the tiny rocky inclusions subsequently detected by Cassini.
Additional data suggest that the interior of Enceladus is very porous, which means that interior ocean might not be one large bubble but a complex liquid-filled cave.